A Scientist's and Engineer's Guide to Workstations and Supercomputers: Coping with Unix, RISC, Vectors, and Programming [Paperback]

Rubin H. Landau (Author), Paul J. Fink (Author), Paul J. Landau (Author), Rubin H. Fink (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 11, 1992 | ISBN-10: 0471532711 | ISBN-13: 978-0471532712 | Edition: 1

A scientist’s and engineer’s guide to Workstations and Supercomputers Crack the Unix code and put its power to work for you. If you’re seeking such clear-cut guidance, your search will end with the first Unix survival manual designed specifically for practicing scientists and engineers like you. Avoiding the narrower concerns and complicated jargon of computer science, this guide shows you how to master the complexities of accomplishing computer projects—from start to finish—predominantly under a Unix operating system. With the help of clarifying examples and tutorials, you’ll learn how to write and organize files and programs as well as run, debug, and visualize the results of scientific programs on workstations and supercomputers. At the same time, you’ll discover how to complete these projects while working on other systems and on other versions of Unix. This user-friendly guide offers you the basics on Unix commands and on setting up and using workstations, and goes on to simplify the once-daunting tasks of transferring files between workstations and adjusting X Windows. You’ll also gain a solid grasp of more advanced Unix tools, such as its sophisticated editing, filing, and debugging capabilities, and of programming computers with differing architectures. Complete with accompanying computer disk packed with practice programs and data files, this book will increase your creativity, productivity, and effectiveness on the job by demonstrating how you can quickly learn to wield one of your most formidable tools—the Unix system. Covers all major versions of Unix and systems from major hardware vendors, including: System V, BSD, IBM’s AIX, SUNOS, HP-UX, Unicos.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Computer Disk available. -- The publisher, John Wiley & Sons

From the Publisher

Learn Unix and its set-up, hardware, software and communications. Delineates the techniques and tools needed to use Unix workstations to conduct scientific and engineering analyses. Assists in writing and organizing files and programs as well as in their running, debugging and visualizing the results of scientific programs. Discusses programming vector and parallel supercomputers. Addresses a variety of Unix's versions and computer manufacturers, and notes differences.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Interscience; 1 edition (December 11, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471532711
• ISBN-13: 978-0471532712
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,165,460 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very practical and useful book, March 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: A Scientist's and Engineer's Guide to Workstations and Supercomputers: Coping with Unix, RISC, Vectors, and Programming (Paperback)

As another reviewer has mentioned, the book is very practical. It treats almost all the topics you will sometime encounter in your scientific/research career, if you work on Unix systems. I could have saved a lot of time looking for freeware had I first looked in this book. The book covers the use of gnuplot, the free plotting program, and also mentions many very useful utilities. Personally, I downloaded xmgrace, a superb graphing free software. Customizing xterm windows and the motif window manager are some of the other things I found interesting. Now, my workstation menu features everything I will use in the course of the day. (Much like windows 95, only more powerful). It took me two years to learn through trial what is here!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's a very good dollars, March 23, 2000

By 

zxteng (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Scientist's and Engineer's Guide to Workstations and Supercomputers: Coping with Unix, RISC, Vectors, and Programming (Paperback)

It's a wonderful book for both beginner and advanced users of UNIX system. Its comprehensive contents help me learn every aspects of UNIX needed in scientific field. I learned many new things by reading this book. I am very exciting.

4.0 out of 5 stars good information on Unix for scientists, but dated (published in 1993), January 29, 2011

By 

V. Rao - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: A Scientist's and Engineer's Guide to Workstations and Supercomputers: Coping with Unix, RISC, Vectors, and Programming (Paperback)

I would echo the other favorable reviews. This is a good book on Unix for scientific programmers. Since the book was written in 1993, predating widespread adoption of Linux, there is a lot of material on commercial versions of Unix that is less important now. The Unix shell languages and tools such as make, sed and awk are mentioned, but not scripting languages such as Python and Perl. The gnuplot graphing program is discussed. The scientific programming languages discussed are Fortran 77 and C.

Since used copies of the book are available inexpensively, I recommend it to scientific programmers using Linux.